Rush University Medical Center researchers have proposed a rating system that standardizes and combines data from five leading hospital rating systems into an easy-to-understand composite score of one to 10 that will help guide consumer’s hospitals choice, writes Science Daily.
In a paper published in the American Journal of Medical Quality, the authors first cited research showing that despite almost two decades of public reporting of quality metrics, consumers have found hospital rating systems “to be limited and lacking in personalization or relevance for individual consumers.” This lack of consumer engagement, the authors suggest, is likely driven by the substantial variability that exists between the ranking of top performing hospitals in different ranking systems: The U.S. News & World Report Best Hospitals List, the Vizient Quality and Accountability Study, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Star Rating, the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade, and the Truven Top 100 Hospitals list.
Two years ago researchers from Rush University Medical Center began gathering the data and assembling an objective framework to needed assess the overall similarity of rating systems to one another. The paper details how they aggregated scoring data from multiple hospital ranking systems to generate a single measure, the Quality Composite Rank (QCR).
For the study, the scores for 70 high-performing hospitals ranked by the various ranking systems were combined into a core data set of ten performance measures. Using a series of statistical correlation approaches that accounted for differences and similarities in what each rating organization measured, researchers were able to better identify variations and ultimately generate a single digit composite score that rewards hospitals for consistency across ratings systems.
Read more:
- Science Daily: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190712133344.htm
- Disagreement Between Hospital Rating Systems: Measuring the Correlation of Multiple Benchmarks and Developing a Quality Composite Rank. American Journal of Medical Quality. June 28 2019